


Right down to the river

by Trojie



Category: Inception (2010)
Genre: Character Study, Gambling, Gen, Introspection
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-08-09
Updated: 2011-08-09
Packaged: 2017-10-22 10:20:22
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,735
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/237048
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Trojie/pseuds/Trojie
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Eames suspects that so many totems are game pieces not because of their portability and innocuous appearance, but because you only do this if you’re a player.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Right down to the river

**Author's Note:**

> This was actually the first thing I ever wrote concerning Inception. I've been sitting on it for, uh, a while.

Eames is a people person. By which he means roughly the same thing Ariadne does when she says she’s an architecture student. He knows people inside and out, all the little grotesques and finials that make them individuals, all the scaffolding that goes on inside, that lets him wear someone else’s facade without losing his own foundations.

He’s a liar, too, but then you have to be, to be a forger of any calibre, and Eames, with only the merest bit of preening and pride, knows he’s one of the best, and he’s one of the best because he can take a job and take on someone’s face and take a gamble, sink right under, give it everything he has, and be all right with it if he loses. He never keeps his mind on the job, because that would keep some of him outside the game. You’re either out or you’re in. Eames is always in.

Eames suspects that so many totems are game pieces not because of their portability and innocuous appearance, but because you only do this if you’re a player. Dreamsharing is a game, after all. A game of cat and mouse, where you stalk your prey through all the little hoops of his life. A game of snakes and ladders, where one false move can drop you to rock bottom as surely as a lucky throw of the dice can send you to the top. A game of poker, mostly - and the other gamblers are your teammates, more dangerous than your enemies, who after all, aren't sitting at the same table as you.

There are three other real players at his table for this inception job, and Eames spends almost as much time scrutinising them as he spends watching Browning. He wants to know their tics and tells as well as he can before the flop.

The first seat at Eames's mental table, the one he always has to watch, is Arthur. He's been rivered by Arthur enough times to know that. Eames has watched him every time their paths crossed, trying to work out what kind of arcane clockwork drives him. Eames can normally sort someone out in five seconds, enough to know what questions to ask or what drink to send down the bar. Half an hour, and he can _be_ that person.

Not Arthur. Arthur’s a steel wall in a suit - Eames can irk him, Eames can copy him and imitate him and ape him, but Eames could never be him. Because where Eames is always the man on the inside, Arthur is an outsider by design, everywhere he goes, and to be him, Eames would always have to remember that he was trying, because that’s the kind of detail Arthur would know. And that’s the essential paradox - you can’t be Arthur and be Eames as well, even slightly. (Arthur loves paradoxes. Eames thinks they make life difficult.)

Here are the things Eames knows about Arthur: He only gambles if he can win; when he builds dreams they’re full of heavy furniture and clean lines, they’re functional (and they’re often beige - the most damning evidence, in Eames's opinion, that Arthur has no imagination); when he dresses it’s to look professional but he doesn’t seem to take any pleasure in the clothes themselves, as art or design or luxury.

He’s a details man, with everything that means. He speaks six languages - three of them well enough to dream in them. And he's never been out of work since he came into this game.

He’s a bit of a name in fact, is old Arthur. Everyone knows _of_ him. No-one _knows_ him, not really. When it comes to Arthur, Eames takes what he can get - he’s a trainspotter at this game. Arthur speeds in and out of his life and all Eames ever has the opportunity to do is make a few notes before he’s gone again.

These are the things Eames is fairly certain of: For all he keeps things perfectly neat, has no imagination and is inclined to do what he’s told, Arthur’s not actually military. He’s an army brat, though, learnt the discipline at Papa’s knee. He likes women, but not enough to let any of them anywhere near close, and Eames wonders if that’s something to do with Cobb and Mal, but can’t confirm it. He might like men too, but even in this supposedly civilised day and age that’s still information you guard, and so Eames has nothing more than a hunch and a hope and their mutual sniping to found that on.

(Eames’s views on sexuality, including his own, started slipping when he started forging women. Now his only preference is attractiveness, and Arthur’s more than attractive. Pity about his apparently padlocked panties, but there you go.)

Mostly, Arthur doesn’t take chances. And Arthur’s totem is a loaded die, and that’s so simple, so perfect, so Arthur all over - an elegant solution, which is what the man always seems to be, whatever the problem is - that Eames always has to wonder if perhaps, he’s missed the point. Because Arthur’s never that obvious.

And then there's Cobb. These days, if you've got Arthur at your table, you've got Cobb as well, whether or not he's there bodily - he's always in the back of Arthur's mind. And with Cobb, it’s all about the totem. Which means it’s all about the past.

Mal and Cobb shared a totem, one after the other - a top. Eames saw Mal use it long before he saw Cobb turn it over and over in his fingers at her funeral, spinning it obsessively at the wake afterwards, snatching it up like it was made of glass every time it started to tumble. From their faces, most of the people there didn’t know what it was, or what Cobb was doing.

Eames knew. Arthur knew too, for all he wouldn’t say a word. In the end Miles was the one who went and spoke to Cobb quietly, and took the thing from him and dropped it in the breast pocket of his shirt.

What Cobb’s totem was before Mal died, Eames doesn’t know. He’s never been in Cobb’s head, hasn’t winkled out his safes and strongboxes, and he has an inkling that that piece of information would be fairly deeply buried anyway. But now it's that top, a piece for a game you can only play on your own, self-centred, always on the point of falling over.

Eames has known Cobb for years. He knew Miles first - he remembers when Father first brought him home from the club for lunch one Sunday. Eames was seven, and he remembers Miles smiling at him and saying ‘D’you know, I’ve a daughter just about your age.’ And that’s how Eames met Mal, and that’s how he met Cobb too, years later, when she introduced them at her twentieth birthday party at her parents’ house in Paris.

\-- _This is Dom, my boyfriend_ , she’d said, her beautiful face lighting up. _Dom, this is-_

 _Eames,’_ , Eames had broken in, forestalling any possibility of her mentioning his first name. He held out a hand.

 _Cobb._ Cobb had shaken his hand, grinning. --

That was long before this extraction business became big money of course, back when shared-dreaming was research and naive academic freedom, in its infancy. But contacts are contacts, and when Cobb needed a liar, who did he come to?

He came to Eames, of course. Just like he always does. Just like he’s done for this Fischer job. Cobb’s changed, though, since they first worked together. Eames isn’t sure what the problem is, but he knows there’s a problem. It's in the wobble - Cobb's somehow not on the level over this. Normally, Eames would walk away from so much uncertainty, but it's Cobb, and Eames is prepared to chance it just this once, for their history's sake.

As to the third seat at the table, well, Eames thought it was just going to be the three of them playing this round until they introduced him to Ariadne.

She’s a little charmer, but she listens to Cobb too much - Eames's uncertainty on the subject of Cobb right now makes him worry for her. She buys into all Cobb's ideas too fast - building, consciousness, _totems_. Ariadne, Eames notes with a smirk after their first shared dream, picks a chess-piece - the bishop. Strong, but not too strong. Apt to be underestimated. Doesn’t move quite how anything else moves. It suits her..

Eames’s totem is a poker chip, except it isn't, because he doesn't have a totem - he's his own totem, really. But people expect you to have one, fret if you don't, and Eames does like to have something to do with his hands while he's thinking. He palms it and produces it, drops it and sleeves it and vanishes it, and it's a pretty metaphor. You win some, you lose some, is his motto; although he prefers to come out on top, he knows in the end you never do. The house always wins.

Ariadne has the air of a card-counter some days - like she knows she's riding on her skills but she also knows her skills are the best. Eames watches the way she smiles at Arthur, and bites his lip. This girl. Oh, she's going to be dangerous. There's no academic or professional life in her future, oh no. Eames doesn't need probability theory for that one. It's there in the way she stares up at a skyscraper she's just thought into existence, in the way that she comes out of a dream more intent on her sketchbook, on the next idea, than she is on sliding the needle out of her flesh.

Eames has been in enough casinos to know an addict when he sees one, has played enough games of chess to spot grandmaster material when he's up against it.

So here they sit, around the metaphorical table, and in the pot are Cobb's future (and maybe his sanity) and Ariadne's career (or so she thinks) and Arthur's reputation (Eames can see the way he itches to be the guy who made this work), and quite a lot of money. Eames isn't sure what his stakes are going to be, yet.

Doesn't matter, anyway. Eames plays to watch the other players, to keep his eye in, but mostly, he plays for the sake of the game.


End file.
